Gyms in Groton MA offer options for both cardiovascular exercise and strength training. Depending on your fitness goals, you might be inclined towards one or the other. But is cardio or strength training better for you? How can you get the best of both worlds and still achieve your most targeted fitness goals?

First, let’s see what the benefits of each are.

Benefits Of Cardiovascular Exercise

It seems as fitness and cardiovascular exercise go you either love it or hate it. Nevertheless, cardio is an important part of being fit and healthy, regardless of your workout goals. Gyms in groton MA make cardiovascular health within your reach. Here’s how everyone can benefit from cardiovascular exercise.

• Cardiovascular exercise gets the heart pumping and increases blood circulation. It works out the heart like any other muscle and strengthens it for endurance, long life, and increased productivity.
• Cardio is the primary calorie and (by default) fat burner, so is the primary exercise for weight loss.
• Metabolism is increased by cardiovascular workouts, too, which translates into better calorie and fat burning when you are not working out.
• Cardio helps regulate hormone production so that you live on a more even plain, reduce stress, live happier, and maximize hormones that contribute to good health.
• Cardiovascular exercise helps manage metabolic diseases like diabetes by maximizing glucose use.
• Cardio helps you recover from other, more strenuous exercises (such as strength training) by processing muscle and blood by-products.

Benefits Of Strength Training

Strength training produces a similar love/hate emotion from people. Gyms in Groton MA can help make strength training easier. Just as cardio is essential to overall fitness, though, so too is strength training; Here’s how everyone benefits from strength training exercises.

• Strength training also improves your metabolism and increases your ability to burn calories and fat (because muscle requires more food energy).
• Strength training increases the amount of lean muscle in the body which increases strength but also endurance and translates into better functioning and athletic performance.
• Strength training significantly increases bone density. Weight-bearing exercises keep bones strong and healthy and restore bone loss caused by aging and inactivity.
• Stronger muscles help protect the body, bones, and joints from injury.
• Stronger muscles improve and maintain balance, movement, flexibility, and stability. You will feel better and again, be less likely to become injured due to weakness, strains, and falls. Strong muscles also help heal after an injury.
• Like cardio, strength training also helps fight off diseases like heart disease.

Reaping The Rewards Of Cardiovascular Exercise & Strength Training

Although you may gravitate more towards cardio or strength training depending on your fitness goals and preference, one is not better than the other and total fitness relies upon the two. Gyms in Groton MA offer facilities for both kinds of training. Whether you want to run a marathon or win bodybuilding competitions, or just be healthier, you should be incorporating some cardio and strength training to maximize your program.

A personal trainer is one of the best resources to help you learn about how one type of exercise can complement the other. With the help of a personal trainer, you can outline your fitness goals and find out what exercises and what amount of each will best help get you there. A personal trainer will also help you learn how to perform the exercises so that you enjoy the total benefits of the gyms in Groton MA  and enhance your fitness program. Often, people who have focused in one area—either cardio or strength training—lack experience with other, and need the extra guidance of a trainer to really benefit.

Cardiovascular and strength training are not either/or propositions for total body fitness. Every fitness plan needs elements of both, and a little education as to where your program is lacking will get you to your fitness goals. Gyms in Groton MA provide you with many available resources that will help make your fitness goals easier to reach.

A  Groton MA Gym Expert Reports! Most of us already know the magic formula for losing weight: burn more calories than you consume. But what if your goals aren’t to lose weight, but to become a better athlete? And how many calories do you need to consume during the day, anyway? For those just beginning at our Groton MA gym, matching up their caloric intake with their fitness goals can be confusing, and they may under or overcompensate. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at why you need a healthy amount of calories in your diet, why the calories will change depending on your goals, and how you can get help to determine the right amount of calories for you.

Healthy amount of calories

No matter what our fitness goals are, we already know that we need to keep an eye on the amount of calories we consume everyday. We need a healthy amount of calories everyday because this is what gives us the energy to do our everyday tasks and give us fuel for getting to our Groton MA gym. But some forget that we still need a minimum amount of calories everyday in order to be healthy and they try to overcompensate with vastly reducing the number of calories they intake.

Often called crash dieting, this is a dangerous road and many crash dieters may find that they gain the weight back they’ve just lost plus a bonus of a few extra pounds when they resume their former caloric intake. Crash dieters deprive their bodies of important nutrients that the body needs to function and could end up doing more harm than good. On the other end of the scale, athletes that want to “bulk up” and spend lots of time at our Groton MA gym, should be careful with the amount of calories they consume and how they consume them. A larger diet consisting of proteins and carbohydrates will help them much better than simply overeating.

The right caloric intake for your goal

There is no magic number of calories to consume that will help everyone across the board. There are quite a number of things to consider, none the least of which is what your fitness goals are. Certainly those wishing to lose weight should decrease the number of calories they consume, but it is certainly possible to decrease this number too much. The number will change depending on if you are young or old or male or female, but the goal is to find a healthy balance between the amount of calories you intake everyday and the level of exercise you do. This is true if you goal is to become a better weightlifter or long distance runner. The more intense your workout level, the more calories you will need to consume to find the correct balance.

Finding the right balance for you

Those that aren’t sure how many calories they should be consuming in order to reach their fitness goals would do well to consult the advice of a personal trainer at our Groton MA gym. Not only can a personal trainer give you a full assessment of your present fitness level, help you map out your goals and how to reach them, and help you along the way to achieve your goals, a personal trainer can also help give you a guideline to how many calories you should intake over the course of the day that will help you in your quest. If you are interested in working with a personal training at our Groton MA gym, contact us today!